"The Vault started to become more and more popular around a year before the release of Fallout 3," he said.

"Unfortunately, the popularity also led to hosting issues. Because the wiki was constantly being targeted for various exploits by spammers as well as other attackers, our original host told us to go elsewhere.

"We had an offer from Bethesda, who wanted to host us as the official Fallout 3 wiki, but while the offer was tempting, we decided that despite the benefits of such an arrangement, being independent from the publisher would serve the community more. Eventually we ended up hosted by Wikia."

The wiki’s original purpose was, to an extent, to continue the work started by Chris Avellone in his Fallout Bible – to document all information about the Fallout universe, partly for the players themselves, and partly with the hope that Bethesda would use it as a reference when creating new installments in the series, which would help ensure consistency with established canon. It was a pretty bold goal considering that we started with just a handful of articles. Surprisingly, it somehow managed to work. Funnily enough, I didn’t focus much on gameplay information and worked on documenting the lore initially, especially given that there had already existed extensive guides to all things Fallout 1 and 2 in that regard, like Per’s Nearly Ultimate Guides. However, especially with the release of Fallout 3, and mostly thanks to the contributions of other people, especially my co-admin Porter21, the wiki became the place to go for all gameplay info as well.